The Greatest Travel Hack

Shelter, food, and friendship — these are the three most pressing needs in life. And travel is mostly just an effort to find more exciting ways to satisfy them. Mixing things up with a little unpredictability and even a bit of inconvenience now and then spices things up, and helps you to appreciate the nuances in things. But there is a fourth basic human need that isn’t so amenable to the unpredictabilities of the road.

I’m talking, of course, about charging our gadgets at the end of the day. Even the biggest Luddites among us have two or three devices that need to be juiced up overnight, and I have like six. It’s a pain to keep them all charged, and it’s even more of a pain to have to manage all of the cables and various charging bricks, tangling in their bags, forcing me to buy elaborate organizational cases,

This way all your tangly USB cables are too short to tangle, you only have to carry one charging brick that acts as charger and surge protector for everything, and the cable you actually plug into the wall is completely interchangeable, so you can just grab one that fits in the local sockets — no need for converters.

I usually use a five port charger when I’m traveling, but there are lots of options, so just get one that works for you. They make them with up to ten ports, but I’d stick with a more established and recognizable brand like RavPower or Anker just because I don’t recommend playing with cheap circuitry just to save a few bucks.